pausedââpurpose. Iâm thirty years old. I had a great career. If I donât have a plan, if I donât start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself. Iâm single. So itâs not like I can date, because we google everyone we might date. So thatâs been taken away from me too. How am I going to meet new people? What are they going to think of me?â
She asked me who else was going to be in my book about people who had been publicly shamed.
âWell, Jonah Lehrer so far,â I said.
âHowâs he doing?â she asked me.
âPretty badly, I think,â I said.
âBadly in what way?â She looked concernedâI think more for what this might prophesy about her own future than about Jonahâs.
âI think heâs broken,â I said.
âWhen you say Jonah seems broken, what do you mean?â Justine said.
âI think heâs broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness,â I said.
People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, like he was something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose itâs no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurtâbefore, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology itâs known as cognitive dissonance. Itâs the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that weâre kind people and the idea that weâve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior. Itâs like when I used to smoke and Iâd hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read SMOKING CAUSES AGING OF THE SKIN instead of the pack that read SMOKING KILLS âbecause aging of the skin? I didnât mind
that
.
â
Justine and I agreed to meet again, but not for months, she told me. Weâd meet again in five months. She was compelled to make sure that this was not her narrative. âI canât just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,â she said. I think Justine wasnât thrilled to be included in the same book as Jonah. She didnât see herself as being anything like Jonah. Jonah lied repeatedly, again and again. How could Jonah bounce back when heâd sacrificed his character and lied to millions? Justine had to believe that there was a stark difference between that and her making a tasteless joke. She did something stupid, but she didnât trash her integrity.
She couldnât bear the thought of being preserved within the pages of my book as a sad case. She needed to avoid falling into depression and self-loathing. She knew that the next five months were going to be crucial for her. She was determined to show the people who had smashed her up that she could rise again.
How could she tell her story, she thought, when it was just beginning?
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T he day after my lunch with Justine, I caught the train to Washington, D.C., to meet someone I had prejudged as a frightening manâa fearsome American narcissistâTed Poe. For the twenty or so years he was a judge in Houston, Poeâs nationally famous trademark was to publicly shame defendants in the showiest ways he could dream up, âusing citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd,â as the legal writer Jonathan Turley once put it.
Given societyâs intensifying eagerness to publicly shame people, I wanted to meet someone who had been doing it professionally for decades. What would todayâs citizen shamers think of Ted Poeâhis personality and his motivationsânow that they were basically becoming him? What impact had his shaming frenzy had on the world around himâon the wrongdoers and the bystanders and